July 08, 2012

BBC schedule disruption and the TiVo

One of the downsides of the TiVo is that the programme guide isn't dynamic enough to pick up those pesky over running sports events. Sure, there's a feature when you are recording a live event to extend the recording by extra time, but what about those of us who had set the TiVo to record the following programme?
Case in point, BBC HD last night, which mirrored BBC2's extended Wimbledon coverage which knocked the prestigious thesp fest Hollow Crown back by over half an hour and buggered my recording of it. Of course, I can watch it on BBC iPlayer on the TiVo (and in HD too) or I can record it in SD on BBC Four tonight at 9pm, but what if I wanted to record it in HD and keep it for more than 20 days?
So how about they set up the EPG to offer to extend programmes after the live sports, too? That would be pretty good and wouldn't take any work I'm sure. It's disappointing that the TiVo guide can't be updated more dynamically, but if it can't then at least we should have warning that the preceding programme may overrun and we can pad a recording appropriately.

I pretty much exclusively watch on demand services now, - iPlayer, Netflix, and LoveFilm, with the bit of Zune, iTunes, and 4OD from time to time.

The lack of scheduling problems is of course nice, but I also like the way iPlayer and Netflix bubble up interesting content to their front pages which I may otherwise not have seen. It's akin to TiVo's automatic recordings, but I always found that to be wildly inaccurate and a chore to look through, as it's just a painfully slow to navigate text list.

In the '90s, we had PDC on our video recorders - old analogue technology ftw! :-)I understand FreeView+ has a system called "Accurate Recording", which is based on PDC.So the broadcasting companies must still be sending out the program signals with their content.Why the premier TiVo system doesn't use this, I do not understand: it is designed to record content, so deliberately ignoring such signals seems stupid.